Aimee Teegarden Lights Up "Prom"

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“Friday Night Lights” star Aimee Teegarden is going to “Prom” – but it won’t be East Dillon High’s.

Teegarden’s switching on-screen schools (she was also recently enrolled in “Scream 4’s” Woodsboro High) as one of the stars of Disney’s “Prom” – but she warns don’t let the Mouse House brand lead you to expect anyone to break into an elaborate song-and-dance number.

“It's about a group of high schoolers and the last couple weeks of their senior year leading up to prom – but it's definitely not anything like 'High School Musical,’ glossy or bright,” Teegarden tells PopcornBiz. “There's no song and dance or singing or anything like that – it's an overthrow back to a John Hughes '80s movie.”

To that end, the actress promises a timeless look at the traditional end-of-school celebration. “There's very minimal technology in it, there's no slang, so we're hoping that it's not going to be a dated movie,” she says, “It will be one of those kind of teenage cult movies that you can watch ten years from now and can't really place exactly when it was made. It's got a lot of fresh faces, which is kind of different for Disney lately. There's nobody you're going to see that's a main Disney star, which is, I think, refreshing as a viewer – to be able to meet new actors.”

Teegarden says she got a kick out of the prom-organizing archetype she plays. “She's a very type-A personality: she's the class president, she's the type of girl that everybody knew in school that was Miss Goody Two-Shoes,” she says. “We see her at the beginning of the movie with her perfect life, so organized and structured, and how she’s friends with everybody and wants to make everything perfect, and is so obsessed with prom about being the be-all, end-all moment of her life.”

Her own prom wasn’t a be-all, end-all for Teegarden, 21 – but she didn’t experience any life-altering epiphanies either. “I went with some friends and we actually went to the House of Blues and had a good time,” she recalls. “It was kind of what I had expected because I had been to Winter Formal and Homecoming, and it was kind of like that. But they had caricatures! You could get caricatures at the prom I went to, so that was fun.”

Meanwhile, despite a wealth of new roles, she’s as sad to see “Friday Night Lights” conclude its five-season run as the show’s small legion of intensely devoted fans are.

“I've gotten a lot of people that have Tweeted me or contacted me through mail saying 'I can't believe it's the last season. What can I do? How can we change this?'” she says. “And I'm kind of right there with them. It's a bit bittersweet. It's sad that we're kind of wrapping five years of my life, because it's a family at a certain point.”